Why the leader of the Conservatives had the easiest job at his party's last conference before the general election

WHEN Britons tuned in to satirical television programmes in the mid-1990s, they saw impressionists doing Tony Blair (with his faux-casual colloquialisms, estuarial accent and other little tricks that voters came to love, then loathe and may soon be exposed to again). But they could also enjoy impersonations of other New Labour figures: Gordon Brown, say, or John Prescott. These days the only Conservative politician to have earned the implicit flattery of satire is David Cameron, the party leader.

One of the lazy journalistic platitudes about Mr Cameron is that he has yet to “seal the deal” with the British electorate. That is not altogether true. By and large, voters like Mr Cameron. They can see he is not the heartless extremist of Labour propaganda. Indeed, the more they see him, the more they tend to like him, which is one reason the Tories can be reasonably confident that if they enter the general-election campaign next year with a poll lead, they are likely to hold on to it. But the public is evidently less convinced about Mr Cameron's team. Almost all of the shadow cabinet, unlike some of their Labour counterparts before 1997, are too anonymous to be worth impersonating. As pollsters attest, they are less liked as well as much less recognised. They exist in the public mind as an amorphous set of anxieties and prejudices.

One is that the Tories are posh. If party strategists think class is dead as an election theme, after it flopped as a weapon in a by-election last year, they are probably mistaken. In particular, Bagehot suspects, the Tories are vulnerable to a nuanced but acute form of class resentment: that of the ordinary middle classes for the upper-middle, who can afford the houses, holidays and school fees that the lumpen middles can't but still covet. The Tories are associated with such easy, unearned wealth. The parliamentary expenses scandal, with its moats, duck islands and other accoutrements of fat living, reinforced this connection.

Next, the Tories are perceived as young and—inevitably for a party so long in opposition—inexperienced. A frequent criticism of Mr Blair at the Conservative conference this week was that, arriving in office with little executive know-how, he was unprepared to cope with the civil service and drive through administrative change. A similar doubt hovers over the Tories.

And, Mr Cameron aside, their motives are not altogether trusted. For all the talk of change, voters still question whether the Tories understand and care about the poor. This is why the plan to raise the threshold for inheritance tax to £1m ($1.6m)—retained in principle, even if its implementation is receding into the nether reaches of the next parliament—is a potential liability. So too is the wrong-headed commitment to support marriage through the tax system. The hunch persists that the Tories pursue power for its own sake; that they are fixated with the getting of it but lack a sense of what they want to do with it.

The meaning of Osborne

So one of their main jobs is to convince the punters that Mr Cameron leads a like-minded and reliable team. That imperative helps to explain why, by common consent, the politician with the most daunting assignment in Manchester this week was not the Tory leader himself, who delivered his main speech on October 8th as The Economist went to press. The man with the toughest task was George Osborne, the shadow chancellor.

Not only did he have to indicate how he would cope with the dire fiscal inheritance that a Tory government would face; Mr Osborne also personifies many of the concerns that swirl around the party generally. Labour politicians constantly attack him—in part in retaliation for his own bare-knuckle methods, in part because he is perceived as vulnerable. Mr Osborne is 38 and has virtually always worked in politics. Put a wig and face powder on him and he would make a fine 18th-century fop. He has sometimes seemed more political stunt man than statesman; talented tactician rather than policymaker. That is the same criticism, in fact, that is sometimes levelled against Mr Brown, likewise a conduit, in opposition, for inflammatory leaks. And considering that he could be the second most powerful man in the country in nine months, Mr Osborne's profile beyond Westminster is still low.

Though he may always be a slightly squeaky orator, Mr Osborne pulled it off. Anyone who pledges to freeze the salaries of 4m workers and oblige millions to retire later than they expected can be confident of making an impression. Yet he managed to make his fiscal conservatism sound compassionate. (“Without enterprise and aspiration”, he said, “compassion comes with an empty wallet”: that line could have come from the New Labour bible). Michael Gove, the erudite shadow education spokesman, whose school-reform programme is set to be one of the main planks of the Tory manifesto, was also persuasive. Ken Clarke, the veteran shadow business secretary, raised the odd chuckle.

Beyond them, however, the performances were thin. In their relentless, sanitised, on-message discipline, Tory conferences increasingly resemble the sterile Labour ones of the 1990s. After the Irish referendum made their policy on the Lisbon treaty look even flimsier than it already did, Mr Cameron's team was especially keen to suppress any possible eruptions within the party over Europe (though they may yet occur, even more inconveniently, soon before the election). But the consequence of the smothering choreography was that few members of the shadow cabinet said anything memorable, even in fringe events where sparks often fly. The price of cohesion was dullness.

So despite the shadow chancellor's boldness, there is still a problem with the Tory team. It remains largely unknown, and in its obscurity there is room for fear. If Mr Brown and Labour can see beyond their loathing of Mr Cameron, they will exploit the gap between him and his acolytes.